My Relationship with Writing
To Be a Real Writer…
I say relationship in a very human sense — as if writing were its own person. Not because I’m trying to romanticize or make some poetic commentary on writing, but because that’s how I can best get my brain to accept the fact that I can’t ignore this part of my life for too long.
I’ve heard time and time again the phrase, “You know you’re a writer if you must write, no matter what.” When I first heard this, I was still very young and eager to see myself as a full-fledged writer, whatever that meant to me at the time. I wanted to distinguish myself from the others around me who said they also enjoyed writing stories and would like to write a book one day. Ignoring my mild superiority complex at the time, I truly had an itch to know what set apart the “true” writers from those who only liked the idea of writing.
Over the years, that sentiment of “if you must write” has held mostly true for me. No matter what was happening at the time, I was always creating stories, dreaming up characters, exploring worlds in my head. It wasn’t so much a conscious choice as it was a necessary and thrilling escape for my mind. I think a lot of writers can empathize with this.
To Create is Divine
I realized that I truly was a writer because I still wrote regardless of all other obstacles or circumstances. Writing, as an art form, as a sublime form of creative expression, had a hold over me.
And that’s what I mean by I have to think of my relationship with writing as if it were a person because I can’t afford to neglect it. If I ignore the people in my life, if I cease to nurture those relationships, they’ll die. It’s the same with writing.
As a general rule, I try to create a habit of writing every day. The only way that’s feasible for my distracted brain is to have a word count goal. Some people like to go off pages or chapters and that’s totally fine. Whatever works for you. But me, I like the word count.
It keeps me going back to my computer every day just so I can see my story evolve by a thousand words. Even on the hardest days, when I’m feeling creatively dead, it creates some structure I can rely on even if every word I type out is garbage. Bad writing is still better than no writing. At least then you have something to work with.
For the Love of Stories
Lately, I’ve run into some writer’s block that has been harder to shake than others. Now, I say writer’s block a little tongue-in-cheek because personally I think we battle “writer’s block” every time we write. The “block” is simply an absence of creation. So, creating anything—writing anything—no matter how inspired you feel, is overcoming writer’s block.
Anyway, no matter how long I sat and stared at my screen I couldn’t seem to get anything worthwhile out. Just strings of sentences here and there. Naturally, I berated myself for not being more productive and vowed to do better the next day. And then the next day came . . . and then the next few months came and went.
While I wrote a few short stories in that time that I’m immensely proud of, I look back and still wish I had reached all my writing goals. But with time came a little perspective and a lesson along with it. I became so wrapped up in the idea of what I wanted to write and how an audience might respond to it, or how critics might respond that I lost sight of why I was writing in the first place.
I write because I love stories. I write because these stories aren’t going to stop filling my head and I have to put them somewhere. And in the age of social media, SEO, making yourself marketable, branding, finding your niche, and monetization of all things, I think it's vitally important to take a step back and realize that it’s okay to do something simply for the love of doing it.
Ideally, we’d all want to make our passions economically viable. I work at that every day and I don’t want to diminish the importance of making a living off your art. But at the same time, something doesn’t need to have economic value for it to have intrinsic value.
Some things are worth doing just for the sake of doing them.
